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Standard lore has it that scientific results are supposed to be published in academic journals before they are even worth discussing. These publications use a "peer-review" system to determine the validity of a paper. If it's not valid in the eyes of the relevant expert community, it won't be published. It's supposed to be a way we can tell good science from bad: with the community as our judge.

That makes some sense but the ideal isn't quite a reality (at least not in my field, theoretical physics and astronomy). We are not really trusting the community; we are trusting one or two selected members of the community known as "the referees". We are trusting the editor of the journal to select referees who are competent and free from competing interests. And we are supposed to put our trust in the process despite the referees being completely anonymous - neither the author nor the reader knows who's involved.

Even if a referee believes the paper is worthy of publication, he or she can demand the author make changes. The author must respond by revising the paper to the referee's satisfaction. The paper bounces back and forth in a slow-motion game of tennis. If the author believes the referee is playing unfairly, any appeals must be made to the journal's editor. But editors rarely undermine a referee that they selected in the first place.

Assuming the work does eventually get published, the author's original intentions are hopelessly mixed up with the biases of anonymous third parties. Genuine, honest scientific disaccord is obscured by a process which is invisible to the reader.

In many everyday situations, a good first impression is everything. This is also true when it comes to building a career. If you want to encourage young scientists to stay in research, then you need to treat them right.

Recognising doctoral candidates as professional employees rather than students is one way of doing this. At the moment, only Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands give those working towards a PhD in Europe this status. For PhD candidates in these countries, their employee status benefits both them and their employer. The employee gets job benefits such as social security rights, access to personnel health care and internal internet systems (one candidate on a short term contractor we spoke to was not able to access the intranet because she was not a proper employee) while the employer gets a more productive and involved employee, who has a stake in the successful performance of the research institution. Treating PhDs as equals from the get-go means that further down the line, these highly motivated employees should be more likely to continue in research.

While being recognised as an employee rather than a short-term contractor will not solve all the issues doctoral candidates face today, it will be a step along the way. And it should hopefully banish feelings of "belonging to a pariah class", as one PhD candidate put it. It would also force institutions to adopt more transparent hiring procedures by ensuring that they adhere to the proper system, rather than hiring familiar faces on a casual basis.

If you're pursuing a scientific career in the UK, you must be aware of the government's plans for a radical reform of the university system. The plan is to introduce market competition between existing public universities and new kinds of private for-profit "higher education service providers" by withdrawing direct public subsidy from almost all university teaching.

Instead, teaching will be funded through greatly increased tuition fees, which students will pay back incrementally - in whole or in part - for thirty years after graduation. To anyone trained in scientific modes of analysis, evidence published for the first time today throws an interesting light on those plans.

Every year around this time, the Times Higher Education (THE) magazine publishes its annual world university rankings. In past years, the accompanying editorial tended to emphasise the dominance of the upper reaches of these rankings by the great American private universities. This year, government plans to drive up value for money in the UK by virtually privatising the English university system necessitate a different emphasis. The rankings data have been analysed to see which universities systems offer, not the best value in absolute terms (where the US still wins hands down), but the best value for money. The results of this analysis fly in the face of government policy.

The calculations involved are hardly rocket science. The US has 75 universities listed in the top 200 worldwide. That's impressive: well over twice the UK figure of 32 universities; six times the Dutch figure (12); and ten times the Swiss (7), to mention only a few. But with a GDP of $14.6 trillion, the US economy is 6.5 times larger than the British, 19 times larger than the Dutch, and 28 times larger than the Swiss. Moreover, the US spends twice as large a share of its national wealth on higher education than these other countries do.

If we calculate what these competing university systems get for their money - by dividing the number of institutions they have in the ranking by how much the country spends on higher education - the US does surprisingly poorly. In fact, it ranks 16th of the 20 countries for which we have data. The countries with the most cost-effective university systems are Switzerland and the UK (see the graph in the THE's analysis of the results).

A similar analysis of the other highly-regarded global university ranking, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), produces similar results. The ARWU focuses primarily on natural scientific research, ranks only the top 100 institutions worldwide, and graduates its institutional scores far more sharply than the THE rankings. For all these reasons, the US dominates it even more fully.

Yet, if we divide the total score of each country's universities on the ARWU ranking by their higher education spending, the US still fares worse than Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Australia and generates scarcely one third of the value for money produced by the two top performers globally: once again, Switzerland and the UK.